NPR Personality Brooke Gladstone to Speak

Mar 21, 2013 02:55:19 PM

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National Public Radio Personality Brooke Gladstone: Featured Speaker for 2013 Reading Together ProgramWill speak at WMU Center for the Humanities on Tuesday, April 2, 7 pm Free Parking at Miller Auditorium for the program

Brooke Gladstone is co-host and managing editor of the National Public Radio newsmagazine, On the Media, an up-close look at what the media are covering and why. While maintaining the civility and fairness that are hallmarks of public radio, On the Media tackles sticky issues with frankness and transparency. Gladstone is also the author of The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone on the Media, an enlightening look at the complexities and, sometimes, controversies of modern media.

Gladstone was chosen as a featured speaker for the 2013 Reading Together program presented by the Kalamazoo Public Library. Reading Together is a program that invites people of all ages from all walks of life to read and then discuss important issues raised by a single book. Since 2003, thousands of county residents have participated in ten previous Reading Together programs. The 2013 chosen novel is The Submission by Amy Waldman. Reimagining 9/11 and its aftermath, The Submission, begins with a resonant scene: a jury gathers in Manhattan to choose a memorial for the victims of a devastating Islamic terrorist attack. After tense deliberations, they select the Garden, which features trees both living and made from salvaged steel. Then the jury discovers that the anonymous architect who created the winning design is an American Muslim. The revelation triggers both fury and ambivalence throughout New York. A driving theme behind the book is the powerful influence the media covering the developments of the jury’s decision has on the public and how it drives public perception.

During her talk, How Media Influences our Perception, Gladstone will share her experiences with the media and discuss her novel, The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone on the Media. Description from the publisher: A million listeners trust NPR's Brooke Gladstone to guide them through the complexities of the modern media. Bursting onto the page in vivid comics by acclaimed artist Josh Neufeld, this brilliant radio personality guides us through two millennia of media history, debunking the notion that “The Media” is an external force beyond our control and equipping us to be savvy consumers and shapers of the news.

Brooke Gladstone started out in print journalism, writing on defense policy, strip-mining, broadcasting and cable TV. Her freelance pieces (on topics ranging from orgasmic Russian faith healers to the aesthetics of Pampers to NPR's near fiscal crash) have appeared in the London Observer, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and The American Journalism Review among others. She also covered public broadcasting for Current, wrote and edited theater, film and music reviews for The Washington Weekly.

In 1987, NPR's Scott Simon asked her to fill in as senior editor for his still-new program, Weekend Edition Saturday. Eventually they gave her the job, and a couple years later, she became senior editor of the NPR newsmagazine, All Things Considered. She was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford in 1991 and a year later she was in Russia, reporting on the bloody insurgency of the Russian Parliament and other stories for NPR.

In 1995, NPR created its brand new media beat and gave it to Gladstone, who covered it for six years from NPR's New York bureau in midtown Manhattan, until she was tapped by WNYC several subway stops downtown to help re-launch On The Media. The program was reborn in January of 2001. I t has since more than tripled its audience and won quite a few awards by brazenly showing how the journalism sausage is made.

Gladstone has won several awards too, including an Overseas Press Club Award, a Peabody and the Milwaukee Press Club's Sacred Cat Award for lifetime achievement, but sadly, On the Media's staff stubbornly refuses to perform any of the associated rituals.